Concentrating on text as the main material of her production, Anna Barham furthers her ongoing investigation into the dichotomy of meaning and its translation as various codes - alphabet, sound, and image. Barham’s project for ﬁg-2 bases its structure on her previous live production reading groups in which malleable interpretations of a selected text are created and activated by the participants’ voices and speech to text software. For ﬁg-2 the process is stretched across the duration of a week where the group exists as a series of encounters rather than a simultaneous presence: Every day different interpretations generated the previous day will be provided to each visitor to choose from and to add a new translation of the text by voicing their selected piece. Barham addresses the unruly potential of meaning and the active role of the viewer / reader by setting up complex feedback loops between human and computer processes. Evoking century-old tendencies towards stepping out of meaning production in a language, her work embodies the intentions of Dadaists, and ﬁnds a paradoxical freedom in Wittgenstein’s demarcation of human thought within language.

The final exhibition in a series of three group-exhibitions marks the gallery's 15th anniversary. Time Shift features three artists’ work which was inspired by the 2004 Exhibition, Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Singular Forms examined the motive toward reduction, restraint and lucidity in postwar art, three aspects concerned in the work of gallery artists Jill Baroff. Stefana McClure and Frank Gerritz. Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) has also been a fundamental influence in the overall programing at Bartha Contemporary over the past 10 years.

Rauschenberg’s interest in viewer participation was developed alongside his all-white paintings from 1951; this influenced a younger generation of painters and sculptors exploring art's materiality and its physical presence in the world. Two essential factors in the development of contemporary art were the elimination of all unnecessary details to achieve an art of pure, essential form and the attention to issues of perception, viewing context, and bodily engagement. Whether it is the Japanese gampi paper used in Baroff’s drawings, the layering process in Stefana McClure’s coloured transfer paper drawings or the reflective properties and divided surface’s of Gerritz’s works, all artists’ are greatly concerned with materiality in particular.

A guiding compositional principle is evident in both Baroff and McClure’s works; artists associated with Minimalism often relied on mathematical means such as a grid or serial repetition. Although the initial idea behind this process was to annul any sense of illusion, this action is intertwined with the notion of restraint. The idea of reduction has allowed art to veer away from art as a representation of an aspect of reality, through the language of reduction the artist has enabled the viewer to only respond to what they see in front of them. There is no landscape or portrait; the birth of Minimalism challenged the existing structures of making and viewing art.
Baroff’s Tide and Midnight Drawings have an indirect, contemplative and conceptual way of looking at arduous, scientific information. Although she uses pared- down design features typical of minimalist practitioners, Baroff’s drawings don’t give anything away expect a faint pencil scribble indicating from which place the information was drawn from that created these meticulous drawings. Baroff’s Tide drawings enable us to visualize mathematical data, the numbers which essentially mean nothing to the untrained eye are transformed into intricate compositions which allow the viewer to envision a natural phenomenon that goes largely unnoticed but is a continuous change on a global scale. This formal clarity begins from detailed tide tables the artist collates from the Internet, usually focusing on specific areas that can be viewed via the web. These websites that constantly record the changing water levels for time intervals as short as a couple of minutes, serve the Baroff as a basis for her work.
Initially the artist used blue ink to draw her drawings but over time this became a problem due to the literal connection between the colour and water, Baroff mostly uses black and red. However, gampi paper has been a big part of her practice since the early 90s, traditionally made in Japan, this extremely thin but unbelievably strong paper is used in all of Baroff’s drawings. The final part of her process; mounting the drawing onto heavy cardboard is the most nail biting action. To adhere the cut out image on gampi paper to the cardboard, the piece must be submerged in water, which is laced with starch. This risky act concludes the working process while temporarily exposing the work to the element whose ceaseless coastal rise and fall the Tide Drawings reflect.

Stefana McClure’s Films on Paper series shows a succession of superimposed subtitles, inter-titles or closed captions depicting entire movies. These are concentrated and concealed in two bands at the bottom of an otherwise uninterrupted monochromatic field. Films on Paper are produced through McClure inscribing subtitles onto reversed coloured transfer paper (colour dependent on appropriation) this process is then repeated until every subtitle is layered on top of the other, leaving evidence of some disruption, abstract yet encompassing. Hours of translated dialogue are reduced to an ephemeral formation, dense in the middle but fading towards the edges. The hypersensitivity and intrinsic memory of the transfer paper enables these multi-layered works to become palimpsests with the iridescent glow of high tech video screens.
McClure’s recent works feature the Chinese “Monkey King” myth, an iconic manga series created by the legendary Akira Toriyama. Manga (Dragon Ball drawings) are created using the same self- structuring methodology McClure uses to create other works on transfer paper. The visual form is determined through the process by which the work is created. These drawings remove all the text from the Manga comic strip, ensuring the information is formatted precisely as it appeared in the comic. Just as her Films on Paper series work on a rich monochromatic field, so do the Manga (Dragon Ball drawings). More dissipated than the Films on Paper series, Manga (Dragon Ball drawings) continues to hold an immense amount of information, in each single image. McClure’s attention to detail and reductive qualities in her work allow her audience to engage on a number of levels.

Gerritz’s work holds temporal qualities through the effect it has on the spectator. The layers of pencil or paintstick applied to anodized aluminum or MDF panel’s forms a metallic sheen, which in turn creates a highly dense surface, resulting in the viewers’ awareness of personal reflection, depending on the position of the viewer and the direction of the light. At first glance Gerritz’s works appear flawless, they seem to reject the handmade in favor of anonymous, industrial production, a fundamental quality of minimalist art. Upon further inspection it is clear that his precise craftsmanship allows this initial disillusion but it is then clear that it is his precision and composition that is extremely refined but it is recognizable that these pieces are created by hand.
Frank Gerritz’s early works focused on the dialogue between volumes, masses and flat surfaces in the space shared with the viewer.

It may seem paradoxical, perhaps, that an exhibition based on the wonderment of representational painting should lead with a quote by Josef Albers - one of the most regarded and unforgiving modernists of the 20th century. However Albers, as educator, theorist, stylist, and technician, has had some of the most profound effects on the world of contemporary painting, as any other leading artist. In some instances, his breakthroughs in colour-theory, and his insistence on the importance of the eye and the subsequent cognitive processes (as it relates to our understanding of art), can be read across discipline, media, or intent. These are not ideas beholden to abstraction, but ideas of abstraction that have bled into the other disciplines. They prove, above all, that fantasy lurks in even the most austere corners of representation. In some respects, as an artist myself, I often find myself returning to simpler ideas to find deeper complexities in my understanding (and execution) of art: ideas such as those laid out by Albers, to understand the challenges of a work, by, for instance, Francis Bacon, who is largely regarded as the greatest painter of the second half of the 20th century. The stark, uncharacteristic and often uncompromising combinations, favoured by Albers, can assist in our understanding of the unlikely combinations in some latter-career Bacons: those unearthly pinks and beiges, or even more boldly, where his palette of lustrous ochres, maroons, and army greens truly come to life.

I'm inclined to discuss the paradox of the representational artist (I imagined Albers and Bacon in a boxing ring, though I'm sure nothing could be further from the truth), which introduces a disjuncture, to which the practice of the representational artist has been challenged, by those pure abstractionists. Today, it’s quite trendy to mutter the word ‘representational’ as some sort of pejorative term: that as representational artists, we are somehow less enlightened - clinging on to some banality of representation, as though aesthetically remiss or delayed in our artistic development, like we haven’t quite evolved into the higher real of pure abstraction. Recently, during a studio visit I commented that for the first time in my own art practice, the ‘background’ held as much importance as the figure. My visitor asked, innocently enough: “then why do you still feel the need to paint the figure?” My response, simply enough: “Because I want to.”

When looking at the contemporary abstractionists, the representational artists are expected to “get it” – and we do “get it”; in fact, my practice has become stronger as a result (and you would never believe some of the artists whose work I frequently look to for inspiration). But the contemporary abstractionists do not look to us: they are not expected to “get” our practice. Such is one of life’s bitter ironies. The truth is that, in asking us to accept abstraction into our vernacular, the representational painter has become stronger for it. We speak two languages; we are visually ambidextrous, like moles in fake moustaches infiltrating enemy headquarters, sleeping with their women, drinking their gin, but reporting back to that world of representation. We have embraced abstraction, and with it, fantasy. But perhaps it is our Achilles tendon in the sense that we retain a desire to locate, to anchor, to inform, that paroxysm where a brushmark becomes a reference.

Truthfully, the intention of this exhibition is to showcase the work of talented painters, both emerging and established, who, I believe, are exciting representatives of the contemporary state of representational painting. An artist like Dale Adcock, for instance, straddles the line between such severe, stark abstraction, and pure imaginative figuration, so that classifying him as either seems impossible. Eckart Hahn treats a representational mise-en-scene with wit and style: both hyper-real and ‘not-at-all-real', his works mock the traditional still-life. In discussion on the telephone with Scott Anderson’s Los Angeles representation, we both referred to him, very casually and confidently, as a representational painter, and personally, I love that duality, where his work – ostensibly completely abstract – is actually anchored in some dreamy shape-shifting and fantastical (sur)reality. I see a tree. I see eyes. I see a monster. I like how it makes my mind tick…

I'm reminded of a telling essay on Cezanne by the celebrated essayist Clement Greenberg (quotation) in which Greenberg credits the influential Modernist with separating the ‘thing’ (or ‘referent,’ for you art-nerds out there) from a painted depiction, to its painted essence. Chuck Close writes something similar when commenting on Andrew Wyeth's remarkable Cristina's Farm, where he states that the artist's greatest success was not in painting 'the grass’ (I imagine him saying this with some long-held disdain for the banalities of grass), but in painting the idea of the grass. A similar feat is made by Alexander Tinei, where superficial brushstrokes suggest a tattoo or a tribal mark, but perhaps appear from merely the artist’s whim. It becomes so very evident that representation is pulled from its roots (just like grass!) into abstraction, where a painter’s mark might become an eye, but on another level, it is only that: a mark, the essence of a thing, always abstract, always representational, always somewhere in between. And what a beautiful thought that is!

Above all, this exhibition is something of a celebration of painters: a series of representational painters' painters, who illustrate the infinitesimal possibilities of imagination, as introduced by representation; its bounds, and our desire (as artists and viewers alike), to transcend, to challenge and to subvert. And it is a vanity project, I guess, inasmuch as it allows me the opportunity, as an artist, to wear the mask of a curator, if only to momentarily present a group of artists from different eras, nations, styles, and movements, for no other reason than to celebrate their influence on (not only my own tiny practice, but) the state of representational painting today as a whole. Towards a new language of representation, where these lines are blurred, and what we are left with is not unlike a painting by Albers: a series of lines, colours, and delineations, only within the picture plane itself, to be deconstructed and reassembled as we please, limited only by the imagination of the viewer.

Andrew Salgado

***

Essay by esteemed art critic Edward Lucie-Smith
'THE WAY I SEE IT IS NOT THE WAY YOU SEE IT'

In the last few years, a lot of artists – and with them the curators who are their eager supporters – have been advancing a new theory of figurative art. This, like so many things in the contemporary art scene, bases itself on a paradox. The paradox is that appropriated images are in fact the most original things a would-be avant-gardist can present to his or her audience.

This proposition has both deep roots and shallow ones. The deep roots are to be found in the long-established Western studio tradition, dating at least as far back as the Bolognese academy of the closing years of the 16th century, that young artists, rather than starting ab initio, must learn to build of the achievements of their predecessors. A rather similar attitude prevailed in China, after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, when court painters were more anxious to produce landscapes ‘in the manner of’ respected Song and Yuan masters than to portray anything they actually saw.

The shallow roots are in Pop Art, which encouraged artists to identify with contemporary mass culture by appropriating images from films and publicity photos of film stars, from news photographs, from advertising, and from a wide variety of other non-art sources. This practice has now reached a second stage. A recent show at the Saatchi Gallery, for example, offered a near identical version of an Andy Warhol Elvis, signed by a painter from Belorussia, and, venturing into classier territory, an upside down copy of a well-known painting by Fragonard – the original is now in the Wallace Collection. Both of these were presented as radically creative efforts to push forward the frontiers of avant-gardism. After careful scrutiny, I couldn’t think why either artwork should interest me. Been there, done that. The only pleasure either them could offer was a smug little voice in one’s head, saying: “Clever me, I’m one of the gang – I know what the original is.”

Given the fact that the original Modern Movement, which got its start at the beginning of the 20th century, placed such emphasis on original ways of seeing the surrounding, contingent world; and given, too, that the Modernist impulse, though now quite distant from us, still governs so many of our reactions to the idea of art, regarded as a process of making images, it is not surprising that some artists have again begun to rebel, and to look for ways of presenting images that a wholly and unmistakably personal. The results are what the visitor sees in this exhibition.

The artists selected range from a few who might be described as Old Masters – at least within the selected terms of the event - to names that will be new to most people. There is, deliberately, no consistency of style. Andrew Salgado, the distinguished younger artist who has put the show together, speaks of “our desire (as artists and viewers alike), to transcend, to challenge and to subvert.” I think the event does exactly that. A large part of its subversive effect, to me at least, is that it makes it very clear that much supposedly progressive art, as currently blessed by so many of our official institutions, is begging for a massive kick up the backside. I’m tired of looking at ho-hum art. This seems to offer a way out.

Continuing its programme of exhibitions with notable curators, Blain|Southern is delighted to announce an exhibition of sculptural work curated by Tony Cragg. The exhibition features work by German artists Mathias Lanfer, Gereon Lepper and Andreas Schmitten; all alumni of the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Blain|Southern aims to showcase the most exciting international artists at work today; these sculptors have been selected by Cragg, who has a unique perspective as Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Director of the Sculpture Park Walfrieden and one of the world’s foremost sculptors.

“I have learned to swim on dry land. It turns out to be better than doing it in the water. There is no fear of sinking because you are already at the bottom, and by the same logic, you are already drowned beforehand.”

These are the opening lines of Y entonces el mar te hablará (And the Sea Will Talk to You), the film interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco first presented in 2012 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and that we are proud to be showing in London for the first time. Born in New York to Cuban parents, a prevailing focus of Fusco’s work has been geared towards the political conditions in Cuba and the population’s means of coping with them. In this film, Fusco’s concerns with the mechanisms of power and control in the political, economic as well as social spheres shed a light on the personal experiences within the broader and longstanding emigration problems between Cuba and the United States.

A very politically aware artist, Coco Fusco does not evade from the issues around her. Compelled to take action in the way she can, her practice contributes to what philosopher Jacques Rancière describes as art partly filling the space left by the passivity of politics itself. As she puts it, “I am interested in politics as sculptural material.” And if no system of representation is ever adequate, then in each project Fusco tries to identify the most effective way to activate her viewers. Departing from her original focus on film and video, the artist increasingly leaned towards more involving formats such as performance in a search for effectiveness. She is looking for “a kind of physiological response that sets people off. It’s what happens to the psyche in that actual encounter that interests me.” The mechanisms devised by the artist are what make her works so moving and powerful.

And the Sea Will Talk to You is a film set in a dark space where the audience is invited to sit on inner tubes to have the experience of being in the rafts used by Cubans in their attempt to emigrate to the United States. In the film, Coco Fusco weaves sombre yet hopeful accounts of journeys, intermittently juxtaposed with a woman’s description of her attempt to bring her mother’s ashes back to Cuba from the United States. The mise en scène, the vertiginous images of the Caribbean Sea and sky, and the pace and tension of the accounts in the film provide a metonymic experience for the viewers who are unexpectedly transposed to the journeys themselves.

Politically, the subject of the film is particularly relevant in the United Kingdom as the country deals with the growing numbers of illegal immigration in Calais and the escalation of the European emigration crisis in the South of the continent, as well as the domestic debate on potential restrictions to free movement within the European Union. From a much more personal perspective, And the Sea Will Talk to You presents the viewer with as close an experience as is possible of both the motivations behind the decision to leave one’s own country as well as the actual life-threatening ordeal of emigration.

Coco Fusco has too often been described as an activist, and indeed a provocateur, by friends and foes alike. Recognising her interest on sensitive subjects, the artist, however, dismisses the label and explains that she does not want to simply shock people; rather, she delves deeply in her subjects and gives the viewer the upper hand in the contemplation of her works. Product of the 2013 Absolut Art Award for Art Writing, her most recent book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba is being published by Tate Publications and will be launched at Tate Modern in October 2015.

m-Health explores notions of social health and well-being and how these relate to our immediate environment, be it built or natural. m-Health is a site for rejuvenation and spa rituals and a place for leisure and contemplation.

The acceleration of technological advancement has unarguably increased our efficiency, however instead of opening space into everyday life it has steadily eroded it. Due to mass social mobilisation and increased pressure of flexible working conditions there is a rising interest in health and well-being. Personal time and space are now a valuable commodity and considered a luxury. This phenomena is embodied by an increasing amount of health and data-sharing applications for mobile devices, a trend for which the term m-Health was coined.

m-Health explores aspects of our changing social and natural environment and the responsibility we have towards it. The project invites seven artists to activate the space to provide an alternative to the spectacle of exhibition space and to create a spa. Using an artistic voice as a context with contributions in the form of performance, sound, video, and sculpture the project responds to the need for a place to reflect and contemplate on the state of our social relationships and the sustainability of our immediate surroundings.

Chisenhale Gallery presents a major new film installation by Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Mangan that continues his recent investigations into the relationship between energy and social transformation. Ancient Lights is the first solo exhibition of Mangan's work in the UK and comprises two new films, presented within a specially conceived installation powered entirely by an on-site solar PV system. This new work is the culmination of Mangan's extended research into the physical and conceptual power of the sun, and the role that it has played in human economy, culture and technology throughout history.

Ancient Lights explores connections between the Aztec Sun Stone, rediscovered at Zócalo, Mexico City, where it was buried following the Spanish Conquest; the concentric mirrors of the Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant in Southern Spain; and pioneering advances in dendrochronology carried out by A. E. Douglass at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. In one film, Mangan brings together footage shot on location in Spain and Arizona with audiovisual data gathered by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory project. This work positions the sun at the centre of a series of cyclic systems, both geophysical and cultural. Drawing on Aztec ritual and the research of Soviet scientist Alexander Chizhevsky, who linked sun spots and the eleven-year solar cycle to periods of revolutionary activity, Mangan examines the relationship between entropy—as sacrifice or loss—and the perpetual movement of the sun.

The exhibition is powered by energy harnessed using solar panels placed on the roof of Chisenhale's building, which feed a set of batteries installed in the gallery. The off-grid system operates as a closed circuit, enabling light from the sun to be transformed into projected light. A second film acts as a sculptural vignette, depicting a Mexican ten-peso coin spinning in slow motion. The coin loses and regains momentum in a continuous loop, as if in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.

Ancient Lights expands on Mangan's recent work into the relationship between culture and nature, which includes the acclaimed Nauru: Notes from a Cretaceous World (2010). Mangan investigates the economic and political implications of our engagement with the material world in order to facilitate new understandings of the structures and systems that govern our environment. At this time of increased global anxiety about energy supply, food security and extreme weather patterns, Ancient Lights reflects on the intersections of scientific and mythological attempts to understand our relationship to the sun in this Anthropocene era.

Ancient Lights is produced in partnership with Artspace, Sydney, where it will be presented as part of his solo exhibition, Other Currents, in September 2015.

Tuesday 7 July, 7pm
Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna join artist Nicholas Mangan in conversation to discuss Mangan's new work and concepts of transmission and cyclical progression recurring in his practice. Andrews and Cánepa Luna run Latitudes, an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona.

Thursday 16 July, 7pm
“The Aesthetics of Energy”
How is energy converted into culture? Rebecca Wright considers the ways that culture can be read as a transformation of energy, drawing from examples such as geographer Ellsworth Huntington, who read the European Renaissance as evidence of the high levels of mental energy brought about by its climate. Rebecca Wright is a writer and research associate on the AHRC “Material Cultures of Energy” research project at Birkbeck College, London.

Friday 17 July, 9–10:30am
A coffee morning and special viewing of the exhibition with cakes generously provided by the East End Women's Institute.
Free to attend, no booking required.

Saturday 1 August, 2pm
Writer and recent Curator in Residence at LUX, Ellen Greig leads a gallery tour of Nicholas Mangan's show exploring the geographical territories, from earth to outer space, present in the film. Greig draws on her own research into verticality and the limits of the visible in artist moving image.

Saturday 8 August, noon–2pm
Artist Elisavet Kalpaxi leads a workshop for families to create photograms, unique photographs made without cameras. This event is programmed in collaboration with Chisenhale Art Place.

All events are free to attend but booking is strongly advised. Please visit chisenhale.eventbrite.co.uk or ask at the front desk to make a reservation.

Ancient Lights is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts; the Keir Foundation; Monash University, Faculty of Art Design & Architecture; and the Nicholas Mangan Supporters' Circle.

With thanks to LABOR, Mexico City; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland. With special thanks to Chisenhale Art Place, Off Grid Systems, Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona.

Vari, a leading contemporary artist working in a variety of artistic media from oil painting to watercolour collage, will present works that incorporate a complex sense of space and volume, originating from soft, intertwined lines and created from materials such as marble and gilded bronze.

In the mid-1970s, the artist commenced her career in painting and gained international recognition. She later chiefly dedicated her artistic life to sculpting because, she commented: “I want to touch, I want the volume, I want to be able to work around my work, I want to create into a space, to prove what I created really does exist. Discovering these things, I began to feel my own existence.” Vari has also exhibited various celebrated jewellery lines from the UK to New York City, which have become known as portable or wearable sculptures.

The globetrotting Greek artist has presented her artworks in museums all around the world and will now embark upon the journey of presenting her sculptures in London. With the artworks in this exhibition, the artist wished to ‘imbue shapes and colour, even their geometry, with human qualities, within a spatial context.’ The sculptures, which were created from marble, bronze and gilded bronze, haven taken abstract forms, as with her jewellery. Figures are reduced to strong geometric shapes and highlight the contrasts between straight and curved lines.

Form and consistency are recognisably underlined in Sophia Vari’s monumental sculptures. They allure shape and colour and allude to abstract explorations of form and structure as expressed by past protagonists of modern art, who, in corresponding situations, also followed kindred creative inspiration by employing essential forms and metaphors of the human body. The strong pictorial elements of Vari’s sculptures were inspired by her extensive knowledge of traditional art forms and their history.

It is important to note that despite the diverse nature of Sophia Vari’s art, the works were not only dictated by intellectual or dogmatic rules. The foundation of her art is mostly and deeply spiritual. Her artistic inspiration is derived from the universal law of creation: that which we perceive through experience.

Works by Sophia Vari are the product of extensive experimentations geared towards the discovery of the unknown and subsequent implementation thereof into new shapes. These efforts appear virtually palpable in her sculptures. The resulting elegant and abstract explorations of form and structure express commitment as well as compassion; Vari’s work is based on the difference between what can be sensed and what can be seen.

About the artist
Sophie Vari was born to a Greek father and a Hungarian mother in Attica, Greece. She has studied and worked abroad for a number of years, in England, but mainly in Paris, and it was there that she became acquainted with modern trends in sculpture, namely Cubism and Surrealism.

At the age of 16 Vari began painting, however by 1976 she felt the need to express herself through another medium. A visit to Egypt in 1978 caused Vari to realise the importance of monumental sculpture, and she went on to spend fifteen years working with bronze and marble. Exhibitions celebrating her sculptural works have taken place at the City Hall of Athens, and in Pietrasanta, Italy.

Eventually Vari found herself wanting to work with colour again. Thus, she turned to creating assemblages on canvas, in which she “no longer created with volume, but with colour, preserving my sculptural awareness of shape”. The fusion of these two artistic practices allows this artist to transfer colours onto different surfaces, and adapt them to various tones. Vari has also gained widespread recognition for her jewellery, or portable sculptures, designs.

Greatly aware of artistic traditions that came before her, Vari draws inspiration from both the ancient and classical worlds, like that of the Mayan, Egyptian, and Cycladic sculptures. She is also fascinated by the traditions that have shaped Italian art, and is influenced by the simple shapes and detail seen in the works of Giotto and Piero della Francesca.

Her creative talents have produced works that are full of sensuality, dynamism and intelligence. Notable exhibitions of Vari’s works have taken place in the Piazza Esedra, Italy, in Paris at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and in Monte Carlo in the gardens of Piazza del Casino. She is married to Colombian artist Fernando Botero and currently lives in Monaco, Colombia, Italy and New York.

About ContiniArtUK:
Opened in May 2014, ContiniArtUK is a new five thousand square foot gallery space set over two floors in the heart of Mayfair, Central London. The gallery, on New Bond Street, exhibits both contemporary and modern art. Le Désir de la Forme will be shown alongside a permanent collection of works from artists represented by ContiniArtUK. Artists include Mario Arlati, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Fernando Botero, Teresa Emanuele, Enzo Fiore, Enrico Ghinato, Robert Indiana, Igor Mitoraj, Fabrizio Plessi, Giuseppe Veneziano and Helidon Xhixha. For further information please visit www.continiartuk.com. Instagram @continiartuk

Add Subtract Divide sees artists revisit the abstract painting tradition with new media, processes and experimentation. Some works take physical issue with the discipline by disassembling or reconfiguring canvas and stretcher, preferencing material qualities over any notion of the picture plane. The historical reading of flatness in the language of Modernist geometric painting is investigated using trompe l’oeil and collage, flickering between picture plane and referent. Other works experiment with scale and non-traditional materials to re-position otherwise familiar forms, investing them with political or gender narratives; Geometric abstraction is reworked in stitched lines and layers of applied felt, transforming the medium and linking it to other traditions of making.

This exhibition has been curated with and supported by SCAN Spanish Contemporary Art Network.